Beacon Broadside: A Project of Beacon Presstag:typepad.com,2003:weblog-14005452019-12-11T16:10:38-05:00Ideas, opinions, and personal essays from respected writers, thinkers, and activists. A project of Beacon Press, an independent publisher of progressive ideas since 1854.TypePadServing Up Our 2019 Holiday Sale!tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330240a4a80791200c2019-12-11T16:10:38-05:002019-12-11T16:10:38-05:00Without further ado, for our inspirational holiday picks, the categories are . . .Beacon Broadside

Well, that was fast. Can you believe the holiday season (and snow) is here again? Time to go on the hunt for gifts to inspire someone in your life! Save 30% on everything at beacon.org through December 31 using code HOLIDAY30.

By the way, orders must be submitted by 1 PM, EST, December 16, if you want them to be shipped before the holidays. USPS media mail takes 7-10 business days. To ensure delivery by December 24, choose one of our expedited shipping options.

Oh, and we’ll be closedMonday, December 23, 2019 through Thursday, January 2, 2020. Orders placed during this time will be fulfilled when we are back in the office on Thursday, January 2, 2020.

And now, without further ado, for our inspirational holiday picks, the categories are . . .

“A godsend that will inform not only how we are approached and regarded by others through social media platforms but how we interact with each other and value ourselves.”—CaShawn Thompson, creator of #BlackGirlMagic

“Unashamed is everything Leah Vernon embodies on a daily basis: authenticity, resiliency, and, most of all . . . unquestionable courage.”—Jes Baker, author of Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls and Landwhale

“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. Spoiler alert: the colonial era is still here, and so are the Indians.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Not only does Gilio-Whitaker look at the history of Indigenous resistance to environmental colonization, but she points to a way forward beyond Western conceptions of environmental justice—toward decolonization as the only viable solution.”—Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future

“Miraculously, Lauren Michele Jackson is able to write about cultural appropriation in a way that doesn’t make you want to drink a glass of sand.”—Eve L. Ewing, author of Electric Arches and Ghosts in the Schoolyard

Beacon Authors Reflect on the 400th Anniversary of Slavery in Americatag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330240a476b760200c2019-08-15T16:27:20-04:002019-08-16T11:04:59-04:001619, a year to go down in infamy like 1492. 400 years ago this month, a ship reached a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia, carrying more than twenty enslaved Africans. Stolen from their homes, these men and women were sold to the colonists in what would become known as the United States. The Atlantic Slave trade would feed this vicious cycle of reducing Africans to commodities through the brutal bondage of forced labor and sexual coercion, the repercussions of which we live with centuries later. How do we as a country reckon with and heal from this history? We asked some of our authors to reflect on this and share their remarks below.Beacon Broadside

1619, a year to go down in infamy like 1492. 400 years ago this month, a ship reached a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia, carrying more than twenty enslaved Africans. Stolen from their homes, these men and women were sold to the colonists in what would become known as the United States. The Atlantic Slave trade would feed this vicious cycle of reducing Africans to commodities through the brutal bondage of forced labor and sexual coercion, the repercussions of which we live with centuries later. How do we as a country reckon with and heal from this history? We asked some of our authors to reflect on this and share their remarks below.

“Early generations of white property-owning men told stories of black inferiority to justify slavery. Later generations cast black men as sexual predators to justify Jim Crow and residential segregation. Politicians, most recently Donald Trump, told myths about the ghetto America created and still maintains. Inferior, nigger, rapist, thug. Such rhetoric was critical to maintaining supremacist institutions, and each time this nation seemed to dismantle a peculiar, black-subordinating institution, it constructed a new one. Four hundred years on, the past is not past.”—Sheryll Cashin, Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy

“By 1619, when enslaved Africans were sold to English colonizers in Jamestown, Virginia, the 15,000 Indigenous Powhatan Confederacy had been decimated, survivors forced to the margins of the homeland in a decade of genocidal attacks on their villages and farm lands, their fields of corn, beans, and squash turned into commercial agriculture—plantations of tobacco to be worked by the enslaved. The original crimes against humanity—genocide and slavery—were thereby baked into the founding of what would become the United States.”—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz,An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“Last week, images taken at the farm of the current GOP leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, featured a group of white boys smiling as they surrounded, choked, and groped a cardboard cut-out of one of the newest congressional members elected to the House of Representatives—a woman of color, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. The photograph captures everything that is wrong with America and its current administration, as it spotlights the national legacy of enslavement, white supremacy, racist violence, and misogyny. The GOP response, which attempted to depict the boys as victims once citizens rebuked their conduct, summons the willful, self-excusing denial enslavers relied upon to dismiss the humanity of Africans. 400 years later, that kind of reasoning jeopardizes US democracy; yet that we have unabashedly diverse, progressive women in Congress contains answers for the country’s way forward past bigotry, violence, and political corruption.”—Kali N. Gross, A Black Women’s History of the United States

“More than a dozen of my ancestors were enslaved. The youngest was sold away from her mother at the age of nine. As I contemplate the 400th anniversary of slavery in North America, I am abhorred. Millions of descendants are permanently scarred by this historical harm and the racism it inflamed. America has a race wound that will never be healed until contemporary society comes to terms with the past. As we endure the latest politically-driven assaults on our moral values, we must resist descent into an abyss of hate. I am hopeful that the commemoration of the signal moment when African people were first sold into bondage at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 will inspire a wake-up call that leads toward a society in which ALL people are treated equally and with respect. As Alice Walker said, ‘Healing begins where the wound was made.’”—Sharon Leslie Morgan, Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade

“The twenty-plus enslaved Africans who arrived in Virginia aboard the White Lion in 1619 were the first victims of an enduring national nightmare. The 400th anniversary of that momentous arrival provides an excellent opportunity for soul-searching about the meaning and legacy of slavery in America’s past. Slave ships are ghost ships that haunt us still. It is high time to repair the deep and violent damage they have done, and continue to do, to all generations of Americans, past and present.”—Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History

Beacon’s Bestsellers of 2018tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833022ad3a9de4f200d2018-12-26T17:48:23-05:002018-12-29T13:26:32-05:00With a book on the New York Times bestsellers list, it’s been an amazing year for Beacon. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has been on the list for twenty-four weeks in a row! This may be a record for us. It just goes to show you how the need for Robin’s critical analysis of whiteness and white supremacy isn’t fading any time soon. But White Fragility wasn’t our only bestseller this year. We’ve got such classics as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred as well as recent books, like Jeanne Theoharis’s A More Beautiful and Terrible History and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic, keeping Robin’s book company in this roundup. Check out all our bestsellers!Beacon Broadside

With a book on the New York Times bestsellers list, it’s been an amazing year for Beacon. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility has been on the list for twenty-four weeks in a row! This may be a record for us. It just goes to show you how the need for Robin’s critical analysis of whiteness and white supremacy isn’t fading any time soon. But White Fragility wasn’t our only bestseller this year. We’ve got such classics as Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred as well as recent books, like Jeanne Theoharis’s A More Beautiful and Terrible History and Charlene A. Carruthers’s Unapologetic, keeping Robin’s book company in this roundup. Check out all our bestsellers!

“[Jesus and the Disinherited] is the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African-American experience into deep engagement with what he called ‘the religion of Jesus.’”—Vincent Harding, from the Foreword

“A remarkable story about a great justice movement, led by an American prophet. Everyone interested in justice should read this book.”—James H. Cone, Charles Augustus Briggs Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary

“She offers us a guide to getting free with incisive prose, years of grassroots organizing experience, and a deeply intersectional lens.”—Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness and Surpassing Certainty

“The gift of Oliver’s poetry is that she communicates the beauty she finds in the world and makes it unforgettable”—Miami Herald

#TurnItUP: “ReVisioning American History,” a Series from Beacon Press (University Press Week 2018)tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa8833022ad3c02e1a200b2018-11-15T09:04:55-05:002018-11-15T14:48:41-05:00By Gayatri Patnaik | A little over ten years ago, I found myself mulling over what kind of history books Beacon Press could successfully publish. With the incredible history titles published every year by both university and trade presses, what could Beacon do to distinguish our list in this competitive space? Certainly, the books would need to reflect Beacon’s progressive vision of social justice and also the inherently “cross-over” nature of our list. Cross-over in two senses—both in terms of the intellectually grounded but accessible writing, as well as our ability to find multiple audiences—trade, academic, and activist—for our titles.Beacon Broadside

University Press Week runs each year in November and was first established in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter to recognize “the impact, both here and abroad, of American university presses on culture and scholarship.” This year’s theme is #TurnItUP, which celebrates the dedication of University Presses to amplify knowledge. As a member of the Association of University Presses, Beacon Press is proud to participate in this year’s blog tour. In our contribution, we look at how our ReVisioning American History series challenges how so many of us have been taught to think about US history by offering a variety of US history books written from the perspectives of marginalized and underrepresented communities.

***

A little over ten years ago, I found myself mulling over what kind of history books Beacon Press could successfully publish. With the incredible history titles published every year by both university and trade presses, what could Beacon do to distinguish our list in this competitive space? Certainly, the books would need to reflect Beacon’s progressive vision of social justice and also the inherently “cross-over” nature of our list. Cross-over in two senses—both in terms of the intellectually grounded but accessible writing, as well as our ability to find multiple audiences—trade, academic, and activist—for our titles.

Professors at history conferences had been sharing with me that students weren’t reading longer history books, and so I was already thinking of books around 300 pages (which are short considering the length of some history titles.) Then, during a one day “editorial retreat” with colleagues, the idea for this cross-over series—ReVisioning American History—was born. The goal is that each title tells US history from the vantage point of an underrepresented community, and that the series fundamentally challenges how so many of us have been taught to think about US history.

In fall 2019 we are excited to publish A Black Women’s History of the United States by distinguished historians Daina R. Berry and Kali Gross. Other forthcoming titles include A Black Power History of the UnitedStates by former Harvard University W. E. B. Du Bois Institute Fellow Rhonda Y. Williams; A Mexican History of the United States by journalist historian Lorena Oropeza; and An Asian American History of the United States by award-winning historian Catherine Choy.

Soon after publishing the initial books in this series, we began receiving feedback from middle and high school teachers searching for material to help make their US history curriculum more inclusive. When the FAIR Education Act was passed in California in 2011—a state law that requires the inclusion of LGBT people and people with disabilities in textbooks and social studies curricula—our books were used as blueprints for developing lesson plans. Authors in the series began receiving invites from high school educators and public-school curriculum developers.

In response to the growing demand from school teachers, Joanna Green, a senior editor who edited a couple of the titles in the series, began working with educators and young adult authors to adapt books in the series for middle-grade and young-adult readers, as well as for professional teacher development. A Queer History of the United States for Young People will be published in June 2019, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, and An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People will be published in July 2019 ahead of the academic year. The potential impact of these YA editions could be wide reaching. As one teacher commented, “having accessible editions of these texts impacts not only the way I teach today, but the way I teach for decades to come.”

The influence of the young readers series will reach beyond the classroom. We see these books going into the home as parents gift them to their children. They will give families a way to talk about complex issues and concepts around topics like race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. Young people will learn their own and their families’ histories. Or they will learn about other communities they are not a part of, giving them resources early on to think about their contributions to systemic injustice and actions they can take toward dismantling it.

Here’s what our authors have to say about the importance of telling these histories:

“When I began writing the book, it struck me that the more research I did, that while this project was well-intentioned, it was rather unnecessary. That in fact gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender people, African-American people, Latino people, women have always been in American history. So the very process of separating people out in order to put them back in seemed to me to be shortsighted. So the purpose of the book as I began writing it became clearer and clearer--it was simply to identify and find the LGBT people that are in American history already. The more I did this, what I discovered was that there were so many people, so many events, people's lives, people's personalities were so intertwined with what we think of as American history that there was no separation at all.” —Michael Bronski

“Disability Studies courses enable students to better deal with the vagaries of life. All of us either are or know people who live with disability. Knowing that disability is not tragedy, and that disability is simply part of the human experience, enables all of us to better savor the human experience.” —Kim E. Nielsen

“I think it’s a very important time to have a Native voice really making clear what’s going to happen, but also the means of survival. One thing Native people have really been about for the last 500 years is surviving an onslaught of continual genocide, warfare, suppression, near extinction of languages, of cultures, of sacred items. Survival is an active word. It’s not just passively surviving. That takes an enormous amount of resistance and cultural continuity, and that has allowed for the survival. Everyone’s going to have to learn how to survive because we’re already to the point that there’s going to be dire consequences even if we very quickly did a whole lot of things to slow it down. Things are already happening. In a way, everyone on earth has become the Indian from these five centuries of destruction of the earth through industrial, corporate profits to get more and more things out of the earth and devastate it. I think Native people have a lot to teach, and people will start listening.” —Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Graduation Gift Guide: 2018 Editiontag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa88330224df359137200b2018-05-25T15:38:23-04:002018-06-01T09:38:33-04:00Graduates across the country are heading off to new adventures and new stages of their education or careers. If you’re looking for the perfect book this season for the graduate in your life, check out our graduation gift guide with recommendations from our catalog. Remember that you can always browse our website for more inspiration titles.Beacon Broadside

Graduates across the country are heading off to new adventures and new stages of their education or careers. If you’re looking for the perfect book this season for the graduate in your life, check out our graduation gift guide with recommendations from our catalog. Remember that you can always browse our website for more inspirational titles.

“Danielle Ofri is a finely gifted writer, a born storyteller as well as a born physician, and through these fifteen brilliantly written episodes covering the years from studenthood to the end of her medical residency, we get not only a deep sense of the high drama of life and death, which must face anyone working in a great hospital, but also a feeling for the making of a physician’s mind and soul.” —Oliver Sacks, MD, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

“This is one of the most thoughtful and provocative books that I have read in a long time, and I suspect that generations of doctors and patients will find it just as thought provoking.” —Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of All Maladies

“A deeply felt meditation on the vital role of passion in good teaching . . . stuffed with . . . samples, stories, interviews with good teachers, lists of things to try.” —Anthony Rotundo, The Washington Post

“If you’re looking for the revolutionary meaning, and imaginative transformation, of teaching for the real America, you’re holding it in your hands! Christopher Emdin is Jonathan Kozol with swag!” —Michael Eric Dyson, author of The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America

“As often in his long and valuable career, Alex Shoumatoff has made visible a part of the world that too few of us pay attention to.” —Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

Junk Raft serves as a reflection of the choices and journeys that each of us makes and helps us understand how plastic in the oceans is deeply intertwined with the future of human life. Eriksen gets at the heart of what it means to respond to environmental catastrophe on our imperiled planet.” —Céline Cousteau, documentary filmmaker, artist, and environmental activist

“History Teaches Us to Resist is an encouraging reminder that, with strategic discipline, progressives have always found creative ways to advance the work of justice and equality—even in the worst of times.” —Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

“As someone who has been on the opposite side of anti-democracy forces, I can say firsthand that Lappé and Eichen speak to the problems plaguing our elections, while also offering compelling solutions.” —Zephyr Teachout, Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University

“This may well be the most important US history book you will read in your lifetime. . . . Dunbar-Ortiz radically reframes US history, destroying all foundation myths to reveal a brutal settler-colonial structure and ideology designed to cover its bloody tracks.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a gift.” —Ibram X. Kendi, National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Wins the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize!tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c94b3901970b2018-01-31T12:42:08-05:002018-01-31T12:35:37-05:00A Q&A with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: The Lannan Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom is a prestigious award that I never imagined being bestowed upon me. Only eight other individuals have received it since it was initiated in 1999 to honor the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Subsequently, Arundnati Roy and Cornel West were among the awardees. I personally know and know of dozens of cultural freedom warriors whom I feel are more deserving than I am, so I am humbled as well as overjoyed.Beacon Broadside

Christian Coleman: Congratulations on winning the prize! Tell us what winning the prize means to you.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: The Lannan Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom is a prestigious award that I never imagined being bestowed upon me. Only eight other individuals have received it since it was initiated in 1999 to honor the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano. Subsequently, Arundnati Roy and Cornel West were among the awardees. I personally know and know of dozens of cultural freedom warriors whom I feel are more deserving than I am, so I am humbled as well as overjoyed.

CC: How did you find out you’d won?

RDO: I had been invited to speak in the Navajo/Diné nation at Diné College and was being driven there from the Flagstaff airport when the call came, Patrick Lannan himself on the line. When I woke the next morning, I didn’t believe it had happened.

CC: The Lannan Foundation awarded you the prize for your lifetime of tireless commitment to national and international social justice issues. What are some highlights from your work you can tell us about?

RDO: I was involved in the 1960s movements against the Vietnam War and US imperialism and was one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the late 1960s. After receiving the doctorate in history, I devoted by teaching career to the development of Ethnic Studies as an activist/academic field. In the wake of the Lakota resistance at Wounded Knee in 1973, I began working with the American Indian Movement in defense of those wrongly charged with crimes; this led to my bringing the testimonies in the trials together in an oral history of the Great Sioux Nation treaty and struggle for sovereignty, and these testimonies were collected in the first published book of its kind in 1977. While continuing teaching Native American Studies, I researched and worked for Indigenous land and resource rights and political self-determination, and helped build the international Indigenous movement. During the 1980s, I was also involved with refugee rights issues related to the US interventions in Central America, monitoring refugee camps in Honduras in cooperation with the UN High Commission on Refugees and filing reports and complaints to the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission.

CC: The Lannan Foundation also recognizes how you’ve helped to develop and explain the theory of settler-colonialism, perhaps more than any other scholar. It’s a prominent theme in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Why is it important for us to understand the effects of settler-colonialism in our current troubled times?

RDO: I think it’s more important than ever to understand the effects of settler-colonialism now, with the current backlash of white nationalism. As well, it’s necessary to understand settler-colonialism to comprehend the US settler descendants’ resentment of immigrants, criminalization of Black men, and a renewed surge to privatize public lands, which means eradicate the remaining Native American nations’ land bases. In the original thirteen British colonies and inscribed in the original US constitution, only Europeans were allowed to enter, and only white men who owned property (land or enslaved Africans) could be citizens of the United States. White nationalists are “originalists,” as is the majority of the justices of the Supreme Court—that is, advocating the original provisions and meaning of the Constitution as legitimate. White nationalism is original settler nationalism. But, the fact is that the content of US consensus nationalism that is woven into the fabric of the culture and institutions is based in celebrating the triumph of settler-colonialism, so the issue is far more serious than the current vocal domination of white nationalism.

CC: Now that you’ve won the prize, what comes next? You also have a new book out on the racist origins of the second amendment. Do you have any other books or projects planned that you can tell us about?

RDO: Yes, my book Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment was published in January 2018 by City Lights Books Open Media Series and is being well received. I’m presently working on another book for Beacon Press on the question of the United States being “a nation of immigrants.” In this work, I again focus on the nature of settler-colonialism in relation to immigration with special attention to the instable Mexican border and the human rights of Mexicans entering the United States, given that the US invaded, occupied, and annexed half of Mexico.

About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaroand visit her website.

The Best of the Broadside in 2017tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c9407577970b2017-12-29T11:09:13-05:002017-12-29T11:09:13-05:002017 has been ragged and turbulent, charged with a fraught political climate spawned by a divisive presidential election. 2017 witnessed assaults on progress in racial justice, backlashes against environmental protections, and more. When we needed perspective and lucid social critique on the latest attacks on our civil liberties, our authors were there. We couldn’t be more thankful for them. They make the Broadside, which reached its tenth anniversary this year, the treasure trove of thought-provoking commentary we can turn to in our troubling and uncertain times. As our director Helene Atwan wrote in our first ever blog post, “It’s our hope that Beacon Broadside will be entertaining, challenging, provocative, unexpected, and—maybe above all—a good appetizer.” We certainly hope that’s the case for the year to come. Before 2017 comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the highlights of the Broadside. Happy New Year!Beacon Broadside

2017 has been ragged and turbulent, charged with a fraught political climate spawned by a divisive presidential election. 2017 witnessed assaults on progress in racial justice, backlashes against environmental protections, and more. When we needed perspective and lucid social critique on the latest attacks on our civil liberties, our authors were there. We couldn’t be more thankful for them. They make the Broadside, which reached its tenth anniversary this year, the treasure trove of thought-provoking commentary we can turn to in our troubling and uncertain times. As our director Helene Atwan wrote in our first ever blog post, “It’s our hope that Beacon Broadside will be entertaining, challenging, provocative, unexpected, and—maybe above all—a good appetizer.” We certainly hope that’s the case for the year to come. Before 2017 comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the highlights of the Broadside. Happy New Year!

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and his approval rating spread doubts, fears, and concerns about what he and his administration would do during his term in the White House. For Inauguration Day, we reached out to a few of our authors, from Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II to Rafia Zakaria, to ask them to share what they wanted Trump to know, understand or beware of.

In response to President Trump’s immigration agenda, which pledges to seal the US/Mexico border, “A Day without Immigrants” boycotts and strikes were organized nationwide. The protests called attention to the contributions immigrant communities make to US business and culture. The generally unacknowledged work that undocumented workers do is crucial to the standard of living and consumption enjoyed by virtually everybody in the US. Aviva Chomsky explains in this excerpt from her book Undocumented that as the rise in undocumented workers over the past decades goes on, the US economic system continues to exploit them.

Remember when South Korea expert Robert Kelly was being interviewed live on the BBC and his two children walked into his office as the camera was rolling? It was hilarious! And the video went viral. Yet it was assumed that Jung-a Kim, the woman who swooped in to haul the kids out of the room, was the nanny, not Kelly’s wife. Same Family, Different Colors author Lori Tharps unpacks the notion that in American society, families are supposed to match; and when they don’t, all kinds of problems and false assumptions can arise, both inside and outside the home.

MacArthur fellow and multiple award-winning science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler would have turned seventy this year if she were still with us. Her fiction is still with us and stands the test of time, especially her classic novel Kindred. Our digital marketing associate and blog editor Christian Coleman paid tribute to her on her birthday in this piece about how her atheist outlook was just as important as her Black feminist perspective in developing the social justice consciousness of her work.

Christopher Emdin’s For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood galvanized the field of urban education when it came out in 2016 and continues to do so today. It radically reframes the approaches to teaching and learning in urban schools by taking to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable and challenging educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become experts in their own learning. This excerpt, posted last year on our blog in honor of National Teacher Appreciation Week, generated a lot of enthusiastic conversation on social media this year, most notably on Twitter. It lists some of Emdin’s key musings to motivate educators to keep going.

The events in Charlottesville, Virginia, were a frightening and disheartening reminder of how hate and intolerance in the US resurface when bigots feel empowered to act on their prejudice. Discussions about hate and dismantling white supremacy need to continue in order for us to work toward inclusiveness and social justice. That’s why we put together this list of resources and continue to add to it in our troubled times.

Thanksgiving is a time when the topic of our nation’s origins crops up again in our conversations. But much of the US’s widely accepted origin story is skewed by the lens of settler colonialism and has silenced the voices of Native Americans. Consequently, many fabricated myths about Native Americans remain with us today. Revered historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, and journalist Dina Gilio-Whitaker, coauthor with Dunbar-Ortiz of “All the Real Indians Died Off,” have debunked these myths and uncovered history that isn’t acknowledged or well known by the general public so that we can honor and reflect on the contributions of Indigenous peoples in America.

Although guitar virtuoso Sister Rosetta Tharpe has long been recognized as the godmother of rock, she’s been shockingly overlooked in rock ‘n’ roll history—until now. This year, she was finally inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We wouldn’t have the likes of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Eric Clapton, and Etta James were it not for Tharpe, who paved the way for them with her innovative, charismatic guitar technique and crossover appeal. We all agree with Gayle Wald, writer of Tharpe’s biography Shout, Sister, Shout!, that it’s about time she got her overdue recognition.

Learning the Truth About Thanksgiving and America’s Origin Storytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c936464f970b2017-11-22T09:19:07-05:002018-11-21T13:31:04-05:00With the anticipation of a mouth-watering feast and time away from the office to lounge with family and friends, Americans come together for Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday where conversations about our national origins abound. But much of the US’s widely accepted origin story is skewed by the lens of settler colonialism and has silenced the voices of Native Americans. With Native American Heritage Month, observed every November since 1990, we can reflect on the history and contributions of Indigenous peoples. “Writing US History from Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual narrative,” historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “That narrative is wrong—not in facts, dates and details—but rather in essence.”Beacon Broadside

Jean Leon Gerome Ferris's The First Thanksgiving, 1621, is a popular image of the first Thanksgiving. This is NOT how it happened.

With the anticipation of a mouth-watering feast and time away from the office to lounge with family and friends, Americans come together for Thanksgiving. It’s the holiday where conversations about our national origins abound. But much of the US’s widely accepted origin story is skewed by the lens of settler colonialism and has silenced the voices of Native Americans. With Native American Heritage Month, observed every November since 1990, we can reflect on the history and contributions of Indigenous peoples. “Writing US History from Indigenous peoples’ perspective requires rethinking the consensual narrative,” historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us in An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “That narrative is wrong—not in facts, dates and details—but rather in essence.”

That very consensual narrative has fabricated myths about Native Americans that remain with us today. “We believe that people are hungry for a more accurate history and eager to abandon the misperceptions that result in racism toward Native Americans,” Dunbar-Ortiz and journalist Dina Gilio-Whitaker state in “All the Real Indians Died Off.” That’s why they’ve cast a sobering light on the national fables and miseducation we’ve inherited about the birth of this country and its treatment of its Indigenous peoples. They’ve also uncovered history that isn’t acknowledged or well known by the general public.

Here are some examples.

Thanksgiving is a US holiday that celebrates the national origin myth. The purported celebratory meal of the “Pilgrims” did not entail the giving of food as a gift between the Native Americans and the colonizers. Native Americans were there as servants, and their foods—the corn, squash, pumpkin, sweet potatoes, and turkey that have become staples in today’s holiday meal—were confiscated. The idea of the gift-giving Indian helped establish what would become the United States, which Dunbar-Ortiz calls “an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources.” Protesting against the holiday, the United American Indians of New England have held a “National Day of Mourning” at Plymouth Rock since 1970.

Of course, we can’t forget about Christopher Columbus. The fallacy of Christopher Columbus discovering America is the United States’ foundational myth that celebrates European imperialism. Moreover, it omits Columbus’s role as the originator of the transatlantic slave trade. As Dunbar-Ortiz explains, the national holiday that honors his arrival to the Americas actually celebrates settler colonialism, not Columbus per se. That’s why, in an open letter she wrote to former President Obama, petitioning him to change the holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day, she states that “it’s time for the United States government to make a gesture toward acknowledgment of its colonial past and a commitment to decolonization.”

Reservations are creations of a foreign legal system, not gifts to Native Americans from the US government. Indigenous peoples ceded their lands to the United States, (often under duress, or had them forcibly taken through treaties), reserving large tracts for themselves. Some were reserved by executive order or congressional acts. We saw the continuation of the US’s colonial land-grabbing legacy in action in last year’s occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. As Dunbar-Ortiz points out, the “public lands” occupied by Ryan and Ammon Bundy and the other militiamen are in fact annexed Indigenous sacred sites that “need to be returned to the stewardship of Native nations from whom they were illegally seized.”

Europeans considered Indigenous peoples savage before they’d even encountered them, by virtue of the fact that they weren’t Christians. Yet studies of military tactics reveal far greater brutality among Europeans than among Native Americans. This mindset justified settler violence, with the language of Native American savagery encoded by Thomas Jefferson into the Declaration of Independence. One of the military tactics used against Native Americans was scalp hunting. The term ‘redskins,’ as Dunbar-Ortiz explains, comes from the name settlers gave to “the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp hunts...This way of war, forged in the first century of colonization—destroying Indigenous villages and fields, killing civilians, ranging, and scalp hunting—became the basis for the wars against the Indigenous across the continent into the nineteenth century.”

Is Bob Marley’s “Buffalo Soldier” one of your favorite songs? Dunbar-Ortiz has the back-story of another genocide campaign against Native Americans that informs his lyrics. “In 1866, Congress created two all–African American cavalry regiments that came to be called the ‘Buffalo Soldiers.’ Their explicit purpose was to invade Indigenous lands in the West and ethnically cleanse them for Anglo settlement. The haunting Bob Marley song ‘Buffalo Soldier’ captures the tragedy of the colonial experiences in the US: “...said he was a buffalo soldier win the war for America.”

Today there are over 500 federally recognized Indigenous communities and nations, comprising nearly three million people. These are the descendants of the once fifteen million people who inhabited this land. These numbers speak to the settler colonial agenda that sought to eliminate Native Americans from this country. In spite of all attempts throughout the centuries against their lives and livelihood, Native Americans have been resilient and dynamic.

Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker have done us an invaluable service, providing us with the history and resource material we need to disabuse ourselves of the false narratives that have distorted our understanding of American history. Our knowledge of the past helps us understand our present.

For those interested in learning more about Indigenous history, culture, and resistance movements, take a look at these recommendations from Dunbar-Ortiz and Gilio-Whitaker.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) is an award-winning journalist and columnist at Indian Country Today Media Network. A writer and researcher in Indigenous studies, she is currently a research associate and associate scholar at the Center for World Indigenous Studies. She lives in San Clemente, CA. She is the co-author (with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz) of “All the Real Indians Died Off” And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans. Follow her on Twitter at @DinaGWhit and visit her website.

The Best of the Broadside in 2016tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c8be5f59970b2016-12-27T17:28:46-05:002016-12-29T01:13:30-05:002016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times ahead, we turn to our authors, who continue to offer their time and insights to give us perspective and commentary on the condition of our world. Our blog, the Broadside, wouldn’t be what it is without them. As always, we’re so grateful to them. We’ll need their thought-provoking essays as we head into 2017. Before the year comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the Broadside’s most-read posts. Happy New Year!Beacon Broadside

Photo credit: Flickr user iluvgadgets

2016 is a year that speaks for itself. It’s been a rough and tumultuous one, culminating in a divisive presidential election that has many people afraid of what’s in store for the country once the new administration takes office on January 20. When we’re in need of wisdom and guidance during troubling and unpredictable times ahead, we turn to our authors, who continue to offer their time and insights to give us perspective and commentary on the condition of our world. Our blog, the Broadside, wouldn’t be what it is without them. As always, we’re so grateful to them. We’ll need their thought-provoking essays as we head into 2017. Before the year comes to a close, we would like to share a collection of some of the Broadside’s most-read posts. Happy New Year!

In January, a group of armed militiamen, including Ryan and Ammon Bundy, broke into and took over the headquarters and visitors’ center of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. The reason for the take-over was to protest the imprisonment of two local rangers for committing arson on public lands in 2001 and 2006. The take-over, though, has more to do with the ongoing US system of colonialism and the illegal seizing land from Native communities. Providing some historical threads to understand the present, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz calls for all the sacred sites and “public” lands to be returned to the stewardship of Native peoples.

Before the rumors of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death were confirmed, he was already being lauded as a transformational figure, eulogized as a jurist who made originalism a respectable mode of constitutional interpretation. His views were regressive, but he expressed them in memorable prose. During oral argument, he made people laugh. Law professor David R. Dow argues, however, that Scalia’s interpretive philosophy is the equivalent of climate change denial. It will be forgotten in a generation and laughed at in two.

Ten years ago, rapper and producer Kanye West said “...I make Black History everyday, I don’t need a month.” It’s a declaration, says For White Folks Who Teach in the Hoodauthor Christopher Emdin, that signals the tensions between Black History Month and the youth to whom it should mean most. In his visits to classrooms, Emdin discovered that black students were disengaged from Black History Month celebrations because they didn’t feel connected to it. For them, it was a relic whose historical significance they recognized, but had no personal import. Emdin proposes a radical approach to making Black History Month relevant for the new generations.

Social media filled with outrage as well as tributes for Melissa Harris-Perry when MSNBC silenced her show and dismantled her editorial control. Her show was important, and for many viewers Harris-Perry was their first and often only national exposure to a broad range of issues. It raised uncomfortable, needed questions about American politics and enduring sites of injustice; it hosted a diverse array of experts for an informed national conversation. Jeanne Theoharis, who discussed her book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks on the show, celebrates Harris-Perry and the inclusive forum an entire nation lost.

Japan and the United States have differing cultural standards when it comes to parenting. That became apparent when seven-year-old Tanooka Yamato made international news as the boy whose parents abandoned him in the bear-infested forest of Hokkaido. Many Americans were incensed, fearing the worst that could have happened to the child and blaming his parents for negligence. But are we missing something as far as cultural differences are concerned? Suzanne Kamata, editor of Love You to Pieces and American expat who lives in Japan, addresses the other side of the story from the Japanese perspective.

In July, biblical literalist Ken Ham opened his controversial “Ark Encounter” theme park in Williamstown, Kentucky. Here, visitors come in contact with a full-sized wood ark, built according to the dimensions provided by the Bible, and the events of the myth of Noah and the flood. Scientists have expressed concern about the project promoting pseudoscience. Biblical scholars have objected to the park’s treating the myth as a historical event. Karl Giberson, author of Saving the Original Sinner, argues that with the park, Ham has done a great disservice to Christianity and thinking people in general.

In Japan, there is still stigma attached to people with disabilities and they continue to be marginalized. This July, disabled residents died or sustained injuries by knife attack in a care facility, but their names were never made public. Police didn’t disclose their names on the grounds that their relatives did not want to have them identified due to their disabilities. In her second post about Japan, Suzanne Kamata points out that this is the opposite of what happened when a driver of a rampaging truck killed eighty-four people in Nice, France on Bastille Day. Names and photos of the truck victims were publicized. Kamata asks: How can we mourn those who are denied their humanity?

We’ve heard plenty about President-elect Donald Trump’s father during the course of his campaign, but not a word about his mother. That’s because, as Love & Fury author Richard Hoffman writes, women in Trump’s macho bully’s world are worth their fetishized bodies and nothing else. In fact, Trump’s inherited and antiquated brand of masculinity is designed to shame boys into rigid gender compliance and into identifying with a tangle of anxieties that can only be assuaged with violent behavior. But this ideology is on its way out. You can tell by the ferocious backlash of its death throes.

In response to the persistent racial injustice and the renewed spirit of activism represented by the Black Lives Matter movement, we released the eBook Baldwin for Our Times to help us understand and confront the inequalities in our times. This collection features specific selections from James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son and his poetry collection Jimmy’s Blues. We reached out to prominent Baldwin scholar Rich Blint to provide notes and an introduction for the publication. In this Q&A, Blint chats with us about the project and why Baldwin’s sharp and lucid social criticism will be imperative during the upcoming administration.

Drawing a Straight Line from Columbus to Standing Rocktag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d23cd259970c2016-11-23T10:58:05-05:002016-11-23T10:58:05-05:00By Gail Forsyth-Vail
On November 3, 2016, more than 500 clergy from many faith traditions gathered at Standing Rock in support of the Sioux Nation’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. As part of the day of witness, Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Rev. Peter Morales was one of seven denominational leaders who read statements repudiating the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull which offered the rationale for the colonization of the Americas and other countries by European Christian powers. By virtue of the Doctrine, Christians were given the legal right to take, colonize, settle, and extract resources from land belonging to those who were not Christian. The statement Morales read, adopted by the UUA General Assembly, called for Unitarian Universalists to learn about the doctrine and its ongoing impacts, not only on indigenous peoples, but on the political, legal, economic, and cultural systems in the United States, in local communities, and in our congregations.Beacon Broadside

On November 3, 2016, more than 500 clergy from many faith traditions gathered at Standing Rock in support of the Sioux Nation’s protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline. As part of the day of witness, Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Rev. Peter Morales was one of seven denominational leaders who read statements repudiating the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, a papal bull which offered the rationale for the colonization of the Americas and other countries by European Christian powers. By virtue of the Doctrine, Christians were given the legal right to take, colonize, settle, and extract resources from land belonging to those who were not Christian. The statement Morales read, adopted by the UUA General Assembly, called for Unitarian Universalists to learn about the doctrine and its ongoing impacts, not only on indigenous peoples, but on the political, legal, economic, and cultural systems in the United States, in local communities, and in our congregations.

In 2011, I was tasked with curating and creating study materials for congregations so that delegates might better understand why they were being asked to repudiate a 500-year-old document. Delegates were asking, “What possible relevance could the Doctrine of Discovery have to justice work today?” As I prepared materials, I read the work of a number of indigenous legal scholars, historians, and theologians. The more I learned, the more I discovered just how much the Doctrine—and the assumptions that flowed from it—have shaped the dominant story we tell about our nation. Its impacts are far-reaching and ongoing. I looked for resources to help explain this to a general audience, rather than a scholarly one.

In 2015, Beacon Press published An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States by historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Here it was: a unified telling of the story of indigenous peoples in the United States that drew a straight line from the first US Congress’ eager claim to the Discovery rights of European monarchs to the struggles for indigenous sovereignty and rights and environmental justice today. I eagerly devoured the entire book on a long train ride. By centering the experiences of indigenous peoples in the US, it offers exactly the kind of resource that helps Unitarian Universalists and others understand what’s at stake in our nation, and how the witness and struggle of the water protectors at Standing Rock fits into a larger picture. The UUA offers an on-line discussion guide for the book.

Recently, Dunbar-Ortiz teamed with journalist and researcher Dina Gilio-Whitaker to write another book, “All the Real Indians Died Off” and 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. This book is about indigenous nations and peoples in the United States today, and is useful for teachers, teens, parents, religious professionals, and justice activists. In short, pithy chapters, it takes on one by one the myths that are part of the current mainstream discourse about Native Americans. It begins with an affirmation of the strength and resiliency of indigenous people. It explains basic questions, such as sovereignty and treaty rights, using just enough history to provide context. It addresses current questions: sports mascots, casinos, and cultural appropriation. It addresses the historical and cultural problem with the common narratives about Columbus and Thanksgiving. Most of all, it challenges readers to examine destructive stereotypes, to rethink what they’ve been taught about Native Americans and history, and to engage more fully in local and national support of the work of naming, addressing, and undoing the ongoing effects of the Doctrine of Discovery. It is critical work that Unitarian Universalists and other people of conscience, secular and religious, are called to do now.

About the Author

Gail Forsyth-Vail is Adult Programs Director in the Faith Development Office at the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Post-Election 2016 Reading to Inspire Action, Find Meaning, and Learn from Our Historytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c8b25d7a970b2016-11-21T17:23:00-05:002016-12-14T15:34:09-05:00The results of the 2016 presidential election have left many people in shock and disappointment. In a time where people are fearing that a new administration will work to reverse much of the progress made in the last eight years, we are left wondering what the future holds. How do we continue to fight against climate change, fight for reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections, and racial and economic justice?Beacon Broadside

The results of the 2016 presidential election have left many people in shock and disappointment. In a time where people are fearing that a new administration will work to reverse much of the progress made in the last eight years, we are left wondering what the future holds. How do we continue to fight against climate change, fight for reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections, and racial and economic justice?

Some people are turning to different voices to learn how to step up to the task of movement-building. Some are looking for advice to help them process their post-electoral grief. Others are looking for expert analysis and critique on the current issues affecting our society. At Beacon, publishing books on these issues is our mission. Now, more than ever, these books are relevant and timely, and we need our authors’ wisdom and expertise. Below we offer a non-exhaustive list of post-election reading recommendations from our catalog.

Community activist Michael Shelton lays out concrete strategies LGBT families can use to intervene in and resolve difficult community issues, teach their children resiliency skills, and find safe and respectful programs for them.

Education journalist Linda K. Wertheimer reveals a public education system struggling with the debate over religion in the classroom and offers a roadmap for raising a new generation of religiously literate Americans.

This official companion to the Ken Burns PBS documentary tells the little-known story of the Sharps, an ordinary couple that undertook the dangerous rescue and relief missions across war-torn Europe, saving the lives of refugees, political dissidents, and Jews on the eve of World War II.

The Great Sioux Nation and the Resistance to Colonial Land Grabbingtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d21c17aa970c2016-09-12T16:16:21-04:002016-09-30T15:02:18-04:00By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
The first international relationship between the Sioux Nation and the US government was established in 1805 with a treaty of peace and friendship two years after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, which included the Sioux Nation among many other Indigenous nations. Other such treaties followed in 1815 and 1825. These peace treaties had no immediate effect on Sioux political autonomy or territory. By 1834, competition in the fur trade, with the market dominated by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, led the Oglala Sioux to move away from the Upper Missouri to the Upper Platte near Fort Laramie. By 1846, seven thousand Sioux had moved south. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent in 1846, recommended that the United States purchase land to establish a fort, which became Fort Laramie. “My opinion,” Fitzpatrick wrote, “is that a post at, or in the vicinity of Laramie is much wanted, it would be nearly in the center of the buffalo range, where all the formidable Indian tribes are fast approaching, and near where there will eventually be a struggle for the ascendancy [in the fur trade].”Beacon Broadside

The history of the Sioux peoples’ fight for their homeland runs deep. To understand the background of the protest, we turn to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. In this excerpt, Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks the origin of the nineteenth-century treaties and colonial land-grabbing that have repeatedly denied the Sioux the right to their land.

The first international relationship between the Sioux Nation and the US government was established in 1805[i] with a treaty of peace and friendship two years after the United States acquired the Louisiana Territory, which included the Sioux Nation among many other Indigenous nations. Other such treaties followed in 1815 and 1825. These peace treaties had no immediate effect on Sioux political autonomy or territory. By 1834, competition in the fur trade, with the market dominated by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, led the Oglala Sioux to move away from the Upper Missouri to the Upper Platte near Fort Laramie. By 1846, seven thousand Sioux had moved south. Thomas Fitzpatrick, the Indian agent in 1846, recommended that the United States purchase land to establish a fort, which became Fort Laramie. “My opinion,” Fitzpatrick wrote, “is that a post at, or in the vicinity of Laramie is much wanted, it would be nearly in the center of the buffalo range, where all the formidable Indian tribes are fast approaching, and near where there will eventually be a struggle for the ascendancy [in the fur trade].”[ii] Fitzpatrick believed that a garrison of at least three hundred soldiers would be necessary to keep the Indians under control.

Although the Sioux and the United States redefined their relationship in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, this was followed by a decade of war between the two parties, ending with the Peace Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868. Both of these treaties, though not reducing Sioux political sovereignty ceded large parts of Sioux territory by establishing mutually recognized boundaries, and the Sioux granted concessions to the United States that gave legal color to the Sioux’s increasing economic dependency on the United States and its economy. During the half century before the 1851 treaty, the Sioux had been gradually enveloped in the fur trade and had become dependent on horses and European-manufactured guns, ammunition, iron cookware, tools, textiles, and other items of trade that replaced their traditional crafts. On the plains the Sioux gradually abandoned farming and turned entirely to bison hunting for their subsistence and for trade. This increased dependency on the buffalo in turn brought deeper dependency on guns and ammunition that had to be purchased with more hides, creating the vicious circle that characterized modern colonialism. With the balance of power tipped by mid-century, US traders and the military exerted pressure on the Sioux for land cessions and rights of way as the buffalo population decreased. The hardships for the Sioux caused by constant attacks on their villages, forced movement, and resultant disease and starvation took a toll on their strength to resist domination. They entered into the 1868 treaty with the United States on strong terms from a guerrilla fighting force through the 1880s, never defeated by the US army—but their dependency on buffalo and on trade allowed for escalated federal control when buffalo were purposely exterminated by the army between 1870 and 1876. After that the Sioux were fighting for survival.

Economic dependency on buffalo and trade was replaced with survival dependency on the US government for rations and commodities guaranteed in the 1868 treaty. The agreement stipulated that “no treaty for the cession of any portion or part of the reservation herein described which may be held in common shall be of any validation or force against the said Indians, unless executed and signed by at least three fourths of all the adult male Indians.” Nevertheless, in 1876, with no such validation, and with the discovery of gold by Custer’s Seventh Cavalry, the US government seized the Black Hills—Paha Sapa—a large, resource-rich portion of the treaty-guaranteed Sioux territory, the center of the great Sioux Nation, a religious shrine and sanctuary. When the Sioux surrendered after the wars of 1876–77, they lost not only the Black Hills but also the Powder River country. The next US move was to change the western boundary of the Sioux Nation, whose territory, though atrophied from its original, was a contiguous block. By 1877, after the army drove the Sioux out of Nebraska, all that was left was a block between the 103rd meridian and the Missouri, thirty-five thousand square miles of land the United States had designated as Dakota Territory (the next step toward statehood, in this case the states of North and South Dakota). The first of several waves of northern European immigrants now poured into eastern Dakota Terri- tory, pressing against the Missouri River boundary of the Sioux. At the Anglo-American settlement of Bismarck on the Missouri, the westward-pushing Northern Pacific Railroad was blocked by the reservation. Settlers bound for Montana and the Pacific Northwest called for trails to be blazed and defended across the reservation. Promoters who wanted cheap land to sell at high prices to immigrants schemed to break up the reservation. Except for the Sioux units that continued to fight, the Sioux people were unarmed, had no horses, and were unable even to feed and clothe themselves, dependent upon government rations.

Next came allotment. Before the Dawes Act was even implemented, a government commission arrived in Sioux territory from Washington, DC, in 1888 with a proposal to reduce the Sioux Nation to six small reservations, a scheme that would leave nine million acres open for Euro-American settlement. The commission found it impossible to obtain signatures of the required three-fourths of the nation as required under the 1868 treaty, and so returned to Washington with a recommendation that the government ignore the treaty and take the land without Sioux consent. The only means to accomplish that goal was legislation, Congress having relieved the government of the obligation to negotiate a treaty. Congress commissioned General George Crook to head a delegation to try again, this time with an offer of $1.50 per acre. In a series of manipulations and dealings with leaders whose people were now starving, the commission garnered the needed signatures. The great Sioux Nation was broken into small islands soon surrounded on all sides by European immigrants, with much of the reservation land a checkerboard with settlers on allotments or leased land.[iii] Creating these isolated reservations broke the historical relationships between clans and communities of the Sioux Nation and opened areas where Europeans settled. It also allowed the Bureau of Indian Affairs to exercise tighter control, buttressed by the bureau’s boarding school system. The Sun Dance, the annual ceremony that had brought Sioux together and reinforced national unity, was outlawed, along with other religious ceremonies. Despite the Sioux people’s weak position under late-nineteenth-century colonial domination, they managed to begin building a modest cattle-ranching business to replace their former bison-hunting economy. In 1903, the US Supreme Court ruled, in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, that a March 3, 1871, appropriations rider was constitutional and that Congress had “plenary” power to manage Indian property. The Office of Indian Affairs could thus dispose of Indian lands and resources regardless of the terms of previous treaty provisions. Legislation followed that opened the reservations to settlement through leasing and even sale of allotments taken out of trust. Nearly all prime grazing lands came to be occupied by non-Indian ranchers by the 1920s.

Indian land allotment under the Indian Reorganization Act, non-Indians outnumbered Indians on the Sioux reservations three to one. However, the drought of the mid- to late-1930s drove many settler ranchers off Sioux land, and the Sioux purchased some of that land, which had been theirs. However, “tribal governments” imposed in the wake of the Indian Reorganization Act proved particularly harmful and divisive for the Sioux.[iv] Concerning this measure, the late Mathew King, elder traditional historian of the Oglala Sioux (Pine Ridge), observed: “The Bureau of Indian Affairs drew up the constitution and by-laws of this organization with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. This was the introduction of home rule. . . . The traditional people still hang on to their Treaty, for we are a sovereign nation. We have our own government.”[v] “Home rule,” or neocolonialism, proved a short-lived policy, however, for in the early 1950s the United States developed its termination policy, with legislation ordering gradual eradication of every reservation and even the tribal governments.[vi] At the time of termination and relocation, per capita annual income on the Sioux reservations stood at $355, while that in nearby South Dakota towns was $2,500. Despite these circumstances, in pursuing its termination policy, the Bureau of Indian Affairs advocated the reduction of services and introduced its program to relocate Indians to urban industrial centers, with a high percentage of Sioux moving to San Francisco and Denver in search of jobs.[vii]

Mathew King has described the United States throughout its history as alternating between a “peace” policy and a “war” policy in its relations with Indigenous nations and communities, saying that these pendulum swings coincided with the strength and weakness of Native resistance. Between the alternatives of extermination and termination (war policies) and preservation (peace policy), King argued, were interim periods characterized by benign neglect and assimilation. With organized Indigenous resistance to war programs and policies, concessions are granted. When pressure lightens, new schemes are developed to separate Indians from their land, resources, and cultures. Scholars, politicians, policymakers, and the media rarely term US policy toward Indigenous peoples as colonialism. King, however, believed that his people’s country had been a colony of the United States since 1890.

The logical progression of modern colonialism begins with economic penetration and graduates to a sphere of influence, then to protectorate status or indirect control, military occupation, and finally annexation. This corresponds to the process experienced by the Sioux people in relation to the United States. The economic penetration of fur traders brought the Sioux within the US sphere of influence. The transformation of Fort Laramie from a trading post, the center of Sioux trade, to a US Army outpost in the mid-nineteenth century indicates the integral relationship between trade and colonial control. Growing protectorate status established through treaties culminated in the 1868 Sioux treaty, followed by military occupation achieved by extreme exemplary violence, such as at Wounded Knee in 1890, and finally dependency. Annexation by the United States is marked symbolically by the imposition of US citizenship on the Sioux (and most other Indians) in 1924. Mathew King and other traditional Sioux saw the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 as a turning point, although the violent backlash that followed was harsh.

Two decades of collective Indigenous resistance culminating at Wounded Knee in 1973 defeated the 1950s federal termination policy. Yet proponents of the disappearance of Indigenous nations seem never to tire of trying. Another move toward termination developed in 1977 with dozens of congressional bills to abrogate all Indian treaties and terminate all Indian governments and trust territories. Indigenous resistance defeated those initiatives as well, with another caravan across the country. Like colonized peoples elsewhere in the world, the Sioux have been involved in decolonization efforts since the mid-twentieth century. Wounded Knee in 1973 was part of this struggle, as was their involvement in UN committees and international forums.[viii] However, in the early twenty-first century, free-market fundamentalist economists and politicians identified the communally owned Indigenous reservation lands as an asset to be exploited and, under the guise of helping to end Indigenous poverty on those reservations, call for doing away with them—a new extermination and termination initiative.

About the Author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro.

Notes

[i] UN Commission on Human Rights, Sub-commission on Prevention of Dis- crimination and Protection of Minorities, 51st sess., Human Rights of Indigenous Peoples: Study on Treaties, Agreements and Other Constructive Arrangements between States and Indigenous Populations: Final Report, by Miguel Alfonso Martínez, special rapporteur, June 22, 1999, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20. See also Report of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations on Its Seventeenth Session, 26–30 July 1999, UN Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1999/20, August 12, 1999.

[ii] Robert A. Trennert, Alternative to Extinction: Federal Indian Policy and the Beginnings of the Reservation System, 1846–51 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1975), 166.

[iii] Testimony of Pat McLaughlin, then chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux government, Fort Yates, ND (May 8, 1976), at hearings of the American Indian Policy Review Commission, established by Congress in the act of January 3, 1975.

[iv] See Kenneth R. Philip, John Collier’s Crusade for Indian Reform, 1920–1954. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977.

[v] Matthew King quoted in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, The Great Sioux Natiom: Sitting in Judgment on America. Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 2013. Originally published, 1977. 156.

[vi] For a lucid discussion of neocolonialism in relation to American Indians and the reservation system, see Joseph Jorgensen, Sun Dance Religion: Power for the Powerless. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, 89–146.

[vii] There is continuous migration from reservations to cities and border towns and back to the reservations, so that half the Indian population at any time is away from the reservation. Generally, however, relocation is not permanent and resembles migratory labor more than permanent relocation. This conclusion is based on my personal observations and on unpublished studies of the Indigenous populations in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles.

[viii] The American Indian Movement convened a meeting in June 1974 that founded the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), receiving consultative status in the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in February 1977. The IITC participated in the UN Conference on Desertification in Buenos Aires, March 1977, and made presentations to the UN Human Rights Commission in August 1977 and in February and August 1978. It also led the organizing for the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) Conference on Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, held at UN headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, in September 1977; participated in the World Conference on Racism in Basel, Switzerland, in May 1978; and participated in establishing the UN Working Group on Indigenous Populations, the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. See: Walter R. Echo-Hawk, In The Light of Justice: The Rise of Human Rights in Native America and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 2013; Vine Deloria, Jr., Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declarationof Independence. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Originally published 1974: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Dalee Sambo Dorough, Gudmundur Alfredsson, Lee Swepston and Peter Wille, Eds., Indigenous Peoples’ Rights in International Law: Emergence and Application. Kautokeino, Norway & Copenhagen, Denmark: Gáldu and IWGIA, 2015.

A Skirmish Between Colonizerstag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d18df6a5970c2016-01-07T13:54:00-05:002016-12-18T18:39:37-05:00By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Two polarized positions mark the ongoing debate in the United States over gun violence, mass killings, and armed citizen militias, such as the militias that seized federal land in Oregon on January 2. These positions rest on the text and interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The gun lobby and its constituency argue that the Second Amendment guarantees the right for every citizen to bear arms, while gun control advocates maintain that the Second Amendment is about states having a militia, emphasizing the language of “well regulated,” and that this is manifest in the existing National Guard.Beacon Broadside

Headquarters for the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Photo credit: Cacophony

Two polarized positions mark the ongoing debate in the United States over gun violence, mass killings, and armed citizen militias, such as the militias that seized federal land in Oregon on January 2. These positions rest on the text and interpretation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The gun lobby and its constituency argue that the Second Amendment guarantees the right for every citizen to bear arms, while gun control advocates maintain that the Second Amendment is about states having a militia, emphasizing the language of “well regulated,” and that this is manifest in the existing National Guard.

The elephant in the room in these debates is what armed militias were to be used for, indeed that militias already long existed in the colonies and were expected to continue fulfilling two primary roles: destroying Native communities and driving the residents off their land as well as controlling the enslaved African population—that is, the seizing of land and bodies and transforming them into for-wealth production.

The Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon was carved out of the treaty guaranteed territory of the Northern Paiute Nation by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 as a part of his “wilderness” conservation project that annexed dozens of Indigenous sacred sites, such as Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, calling the federal theft “public lands,” which ever since have been leased out for ranching, mining, oil pipelines. These descendants of the first Euroamerican settlers, who grabbed land for ranching from the portions of Native territories in the Northwest and intermountain Great Basin that the federal government allotted for sale, have long been agitating for the privatization (under the guise of “states-rights”) of the “public lands” that they already lease for next to nothing. This is a continuation of the Indian wars, fronted by settlers, but made possible by the continuing US system of colonialism. All these sacred sites and “public” lands must be returned to the stewardship of the Native nations from whom they were illegally seized.

Britain’s victory at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763 led to English domination of world trade, sea power, and colonial holdings for a century and a half. In the Treaty of Paris (1763) France ceded Canada and all claims east of the Mississippi to Britain. In the course of the war, Anglo settlers had gained strength in numbers and security in relation to Indigenous peoples just outside the British-occupied colonies. Even there, significant numbers of settlers had squatted on Indigenous lands beyond the colonies’ putative boundaries, reaching into the Ohio Valley region. To the settlers’ dismay, soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, King George III issued a proclamation that prohibited British settlement west of the Allegheny-Appalachian mountain barrier, ordering those who had settled there to relinquish their claims and move back east of the line. However, British authorities did not commit enough troops to the frontier to enforce the edict effectively. As a result, thousands more settlers poured over the mountains and squatted on Indigenous lands.

By the early 1770s, terror against Indigenous people on the part of Anglo settlers increased in all the colonies, and speculation in western lands was rampant. In the southern colonies especially, farmers who had lost their land in competition with larger, more efficient, slave-worked plantations rushed for western land. These settler-farmers thus set, as [military historian John] Grenier writes, “a prefigurative pattern of U.S. annexation and colonization of Indigenous nations across the continent for the following century: a vanguard of farmer- settlers led by seasoned ‘Indian fighters,’ calling on authorities/ militias of the British colonies, first, and the U.S. government/army later, to defend their settlements, forming the core dynamic of U.S. ‘democracy.’”

The French and Indian War would later be seen as the trigger for independence of the settler population, in which the distinctly “American” nation was born. This mythology was expressed in the 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757, in which the author—land speculator James Fenimore Cooper—created a usable settler-colonial history. Blockbuster Hollywood adaptations of the book in 1932 and 1992 reinforced the mythology. But the 1940 film, based on the best-selling novel Northwest Passage, which is considered a classic and remains popular due to repeated television showings, goes even further in portraying the bloodthirsty mercenaries, Rogers’s Rangers, as heroes for their annihilation of a village of Abenakis.

From Chapter 3: “Cult of the Covenant,” pp. 49-50

Although the US Constitution represents for many US citizens a covenant with God, the US origin story goes back to the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the Plymouth Colony, named for the ship that carried the hundred or so passengers to what is now Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620. Forty-one of the “Pilgrims,” all men, wrote and signed the compact. Invoking God’s name and declaring themselves loyal subjects of the king, the signatories announced that they had journeyed to northern “Virginia,” as the eastern seaboard of North America was called by the English, “to plant the First Colony” and did therefore “Covenant and Combine ourselves together in a Civil Body Politic” to be governed by “just and equal Laws” enacted “for the general good of the Colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.” The original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony, founded in 1630, adopted an official seal designed in England before their journey. The central image depicts a near-naked native holding a harmless, flimsy-looking bow and arrow and inscribed with the plea, “Come over and help us.” Nearly three hundred years later, the official seal of the US military veterans of the “Spanish-American War” (the invasion and occupation of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines) showed a naked woman kneeling before an armed US soldier and a sailor, with a US battleship in the background. One may trace this recurrent altruistic theme into the early twenty-first century, when the United States still invades countries under the guise of rescue.

In other modern constitutional states, constitutions come and go, and they are never considered sacred in the manner patriotic US citizens venerate theirs. Great Britain has no written constitution. The Magna Carta arguably comes close, but it does not reflect a covenant. US citizens did not inherit their cult-like adherence to their constitution from the English. From the Pilgrims to the founders of the United States and continuing to the present, the cultural persistence of the covenant idea, and thus the bedrock of US patriotism, represents a deviation from the main course in the development of national identities. Arguably, both the 1948 birth of the state of Israel and advent of Nationalist Party rule of South Africa were emulations of the US founding; certainly many US Americans closely identify with the state of Israel, as they did with Afrikaner- ruled South Africa. Patriotic US politicians and citizens take pride in “exceptionalism.” Historians and legal theorists characterize US statecraft and empire as those of a “nation of laws,” rather than one dominated by a particular class or group of interests, suggesting a kind of holiness.

The US Constitution, the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, the writings of the “Founding Fathers,” Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, the Pledge of Allegiance, and even Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are all bundled into the covenant as sacred documents that express the US state religion. An aspect of this most visible in the early twenty-first century is the burgeoning “gun lobby,” based on the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the Constitution. In the forefront of these Second Amendment adherents are the descendants of the old settlers who say that they represent “the people” and have the right to bear arms in order to overthrow any government that does not in their view adhere to the God-given covenant.

About the Author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro.

The Broadside’s Greatest Hits: 2015 in Reviewtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d187f375970c2015-12-31T13:18:10-05:002015-12-31T13:18:10-05:002015 has been, to say the least, rather momentous, and continues to be as it draws to a close. We at Beacon Press are so grateful to our brilliant authors who have offered their time and insights to analyze and comment on this year's events. Their posts—with topics ranging from race to cultural or class dynamics and to the environment—have been, if you will, a true beacon for the Broadside. Before we bid farewell to 2015, we would like to share a collection of some our most-read posts. This list is by no means exhaustive. Make sure to peruse our archives. You can expect to see more thought-provoking essays and commentary from our contributors in 2016. Happy New Year!Beacon Broadside

2015 has been, to say the least, rather momentous, and continues to be as it draws to a close. We at Beacon Press are so grateful to our brilliant authors who have offered their time and insights to analyze and comment on this year's events. Their posts—with topics ranging from race to cultural or class dynamics and to the environment—have been, if you will, a true beacon for the Broadside. Before we bid farewell to 2015, we would like to share a collection of some our most-read posts. This list is by no means exhaustive. Make sure to peruse our archives. You can expect to see more thought-provoking essays and commentary from our contributors in 2016. Happy New Year!

Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States chronicles four centuries of Native Americans actively resisting expansion of the US empire, colonialism, and the attendant structural injustices. Colonialism and its legacy of injustices, however, are still a part of the present as much as they are a part of our country’s past. In May, the new and admired Pope Francis announced the canonization of Junípero Serra, thereby venerating European colonization and genocide. Dunbar-Ortiz implores us to celebrate the insurgent actions of California’s Indigenous nations against Serra’s totalitarian order, not the oppressor.

For Nura Maznavi, attorney, writer, and co-editor of Salaam, Love: American Muslim Men on Love, Sex & Intimacy, Ramadan was a time when, as a child, she could pretend to be an adult. She insisted on fasting the entire month starting at the age of seven. Ramadan became more challenging as the years went on, but she never missed a day of fasting—until she became pregnant. This year, the second time around, Maznavi didn’t fast because she was nursing, and she didn’t feel bad about it. She found other ways of feeling the Ramadan spirit.

When you’re a new teacher, or one with years of experience, and you’re faced with disobedient children, unfriendly administrators, shortages of supplies, and demanding parents, how do you avoid the besieged teacher trap? How do you work with the pressures and expectations of the classroom while cultivating the practice of figuring out how your students can enjoy their time together more, how they can take on the wider world with curiosity, creativity, and zest? Robert Fried, author of The Passionate Teacher, lays out the foundation for educators to become the passionate teacher they want to be, the kind who can’t wait to get into the classroom.

Robert Oswald and Michelle Bamberber, authors of The Real Cost of Fracking, pored over all of one thousand pages of the EPA’s long-awaited study on the effects of hydraulic fracturing in the United States. News reports of the study claimed that fracturing was safe and did not jeopardize our water and water resources. Given the study’s wide coverage in the media, how did so many news outlets get the story so wrong? Well, as Oswald and Bamberger explain, only a select few actually read the study. Not only do they point us to specific details in the report about the dangers of fracking on our water, they also review the aftermath of the misinformation fed to the masses.

The publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman was, by and large, one of this year’s highly anticipated—and controversial—cultural milestones. Readers who had fallen in love with Atticus Finch as the heroic savior in To Kill a Mockingbird were shocked when confronted with an altogether contrary characterization of the man who had stood for racial justice. In Watchman, Lee gives us his back-story and shows Atticus as he always was, a lawyer groomed for white supremacy and racism in the Jim Crow South. Whitlock and Bronski, authors of Considering Hate, examine how and why Lee’s frank portrayal of Atticus challenges the white American literary imagination.

Texas made the headlines in October when schools across the state put some dodgy textbooks from McGraw-Hill Education on their curricula. The geography textbooks referred to African slaves as “workers” and completely downplayed slave owners’ brutal treatment of slaves with other linguistic sleights of hand. They, in effect, whitewashed American slavery history. What’s most disconcerting about this is that the textbooks were approved for Texas high schools. We at Beacon reached out to our authors who have written about American Slavery history to ask them for corrective reading. With recommendations from Mary Frances Berry, Thomas Norman DeWolf, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Anita Hill, Sharon Leslie Morgan, and Marcus Rediker, we were able to put together a robust list.

Beacon's Bestsellers of the Yeartag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb08a48a53970d2015-12-29T15:27:43-05:002015-12-29T15:13:15-05:00What’s your News Years resolution? To read more books, of course! But where to start? Why not with our bestsellers? For your perusal, we’ve put together a list of our bestsellers this year. We are so thrilled that some of these titles that have appeared on best-of lists, have won and have been nominated for awards! You can get these titles, as well as all our other titles, for 30% off using code HOLIDAY30 through December 31st. You still have time. Check out our website.Beacon Broadside

What’s your News Years resolution? To read more books, of course! But where to start? Why not with our bestsellers? For your perusal, we’ve put together a list of our bestsellers this year. We are so thrilled that some of these titles that have appeared on best-of lists, have won and have been nominated for awards! You can get these titles, as well as all our other titles, for 30% off using code HOLIDAY30 through December 31st. You still have time. Check out our website.

Nancy Ellen Abrams, philosopher of science, lawyer, and lifelong atheist, explores a radically new way of thinking about God in A God That Could Be Real. The omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a God that can comfort and empower us. In her paradigm-shifting blend of science, religion, and philosophy, Abrams imagines a higher power in the new science of emergence. God, she argues, is an “emergent phenomenon” that arises from the staggering complexity of humanity’s collective aspirations and is in dialogue with every individual. This God created the meaning of the universe and helps us change the world.

After a freak accident during a pick-up game of basketball in his junior year at Harvard, writer Howard Axelrod became permanently blind in his right eye. His perception of the world and of himself lost its sense of balance and solidity. The distance between how others saw him and how he saw himself widened into a gulf. Desperate for a stable sense of orientation, and reeling from a failed romance with a woman in Italy, Axelrod retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a computer or television, and mostly without human interaction, for two years. His lyrical memoir The Point of Vanishing, named as one of Laura Miller’s 10 favorite books of 2015 on Slate.com and selected for many other best book lists, follows him in his search for identity and the stabilizing beauty of nature.

In his biography One Righteous Man, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Arthur Browne not only chronicles the life of Samuel Battle, an unjustly forgotten civil rights pioneer, he also creates an important and compelling social history of New York. Samuel Battle, the New York Police Department’s first ever black officer, broke the color line as early as the second decade of the twentieth century. The son of former slaves in the South, Battle led an against-all-odds journey to the top of his career, facing racism from his own colleagues, further hostility from criminals, and death threats. He had to be three times better than his white peers and many times more resilient. His smarts, strength, and outsized personality carried him through the trajectory of his career and the bustling cultural milieu of the first half of the twentieth century. One Righteous Man has been nominated for the NAACP Image Award.

Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States has truly resonated with readers. Covering four centuries of Native Americans actively resisting expansion of the US empire, colonialism, and the attendant systemic injustices against them, it is the first book of its kind—a history of our country told from the perspective of Indigenous nations. It challenges the pervasive mythos of our colonial heritage and gives a voice to the participants in American history that for long stretches of time were silenced.

First published in 1959, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning continues to be relevant to this day. Based on his own experiences in Nazi death camps and the stories of his patients, his memoir argues that while suffering is unavoidable, we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward. This year, his book helped late-night talk show host Jimmy Fallon through his ring avulsion accident and Chris Martin, lead vocalist of the English rock back Coldplay, through his breakup with actress Gwyneth Paltrow. Indeed, the enduring influence of Man’s Search for Meaning is broad and far-reaching.

Renowned as the ambassador for nonviolent protest and celebrated as one of the greatest orators in our history, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. isn’t usually recognized for his radical thinking. As Cornel West informs us in The Radical King from our King Legacy Book Series, the FBI and the US government knew just how radical he was. West edited and wrote an introduction to this collection that showcases Dr. King’s revolutionary vision: his identification with the poor, his crusade against global imperialism, his unapologetic opposition to the Vietnam War. The Radical King shows one of the most recognizable leaders of the civil rights movement to be every bit as radical as Malcolm X.

Sometimes Nature’s salvation comes in the form we least expect. In The New Wild, named one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist, environmental journalist Fred Pearce explains how invasive species are crucial in helping nature regenerate. His provocative exploration of this new ecology scrutinizes our misconceptions—and misgivings—about alien species. His travels across six continents show how the rewilding of the earth owes itself to the alien species that settle down and become model eco-citizens. In an era of climate change and widespread ecological damage, Pearce argues that we need to let go of our idea of reengineering ecosystems and embrace Nature’s helpful invaders.

Hailed by the Washington Post as one of the notable nonfiction books of 2015, Eileen Pollack’s The One Woman in the Roomasks why science is still a boys’ club, even in the twenty-first century. Part memoir and part case study, her book compiles her personal experiences with those of young women today, and honestly explores the most recent findings about why women often choose not to pursue careers in STEM (sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics). Pollack herself, novelist, short story writer, and professor of creative writing, was one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science in physics from Yale in 1978. Her book not only documents the subtle disincentives women in the sciences still face, but also provides hope for changing attitudes and behaviors in ways that could bring far more women in the fields where they’re underrepresented.

There is such a thing as too much medical care, which can become excessive, ineffective, and sometimes harmful. Dr. H. Gilbert Welch’s provocative Less Medicine, More Health diagnoses seven widespread assumptions that have convinced the American public that seeking medical care is one of the most important steps to maintain wellness. Drawing from fascinating stories and compelling data, Dr. Welch proves that it’s not always better to fix the problem, that sooner (or newer) isn’t always better, that getting more information can actually be detrimental. Too many people are made to worry about diseases and afflictions they don’t have. Medical care, surprisingly, is not well correlated with good health. Dr. Welch’s book could save you money and, more importantly, improve your health outcome.

Watching Our Language: Recommended Reading on American Slavery Historytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b7c7e52571970b2015-10-30T13:26:12-04:002015-10-30T13:14:05-04:00George Orwell’s 1984 taught us that language—and who uses it—truly does matter. In the case of educating Texan youth about American history, language matters a great deal. McGraw-Hill Education’s current geography textbook, approved for Texas high schools, refers to African slaves as “workers” in a chapter on immigration patterns. Other linguistic sleights of hand include using the passive voice to obscure slave owner’s brutal treatment of slaves. It appears we have a Ministry of Truth at work after all, just like the one where Orwell’s ill-fated hero Winston Smith worked, rewriting history. The fact is especially disconcerting, as Texas is the largest consumer of textbooks.Beacon Broadside

Source: New York Public Library

George Orwell’s 1984 taught us that language—and who uses it—truly does matter. In the case of educating Texan youth about American history, language matters a great deal. McGraw-Hill Education’s current geography textbook, approved for Texas high schools, refers to African slaves as “workers” in a chapter on immigration patterns. Other linguistic sleights of hand include using the passive voice to obscure slave owner’s brutal treatment of slaves. It appears we have a Ministry of Truth at work after all, just like the one where Orwell’s ill-fated hero Winston Smith worked, rewriting history. The fact is especially disconcerting, as Texas is the largest consumer of textbooks.

David Levin, president and chief executive of McGraw-Hill Education, has promised a revision of the textbook. The digital version and the next printed edition will reflect the Africans’ forced migration and enslavement. In the meantime, McGraw-Hill Education is sending stickers to cover up the “workers” passage. High school social-studies teachers will set aside the textbook for this subject and teach from other books. The fact remains, however, that the professionals and consultants enlisted for their expertise on the textbook whitewashed history.

Luckily, there is an abundance of rigorous scholarship on the history of American slavery. We asked our authors who have written on this issue for a list of books about the Atlantic Slave Trade that influenced their writing.

The Blind Spot of United States Historytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d16677dc970c2015-10-12T12:45:33-04:002018-10-05T16:28:36-04:00The most frequent question readers ask about An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is: "Why hasn't this book been written before?" I'm flattered by that question, because it's the one I ask about texts that deeply move me; at the same time the information, argument, or story is new to me, it seems that it was already hidden in the recesses of my brain or heart, a truth. I knew the story I wanted to tell when I set out to write the book, part of Beacon Press's ReVisioning American History series, but that didn't make it easier to transfer to paper. Writing and rewriting, I discovered the story, just as my readers do as they read it.Beacon Broadside

The most frequent question readers ask about An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States is: "Why hasn't this book been written before?" I'm flattered by that question, because it's the one I ask about texts that deeply move me; at the same time the information, argument, or story is new to me, it seems that it was already hidden in the recesses of my brain or heart, a truth. I knew the story I wanted to tell when I set out to write the book, part of Beacon Press's ReVisioning American History series, but that didn't make it easier to transfer to paper. Writing and rewriting, I discovered the story, just as my readers do as they read it.

But why hasn't this book been written before? We believe we don't suffer censorship in the U.S., but we do. Rather than being mandated by the government, historians self-censor in response to institutionalized policing of the parameters of what's acceptable and what will be marginalized. William Burroughs's narrator in his 1984 novel, The Place of Dead Roads, observes that "people are not bribed to shut up about what they know. They are bribed not to find out...Now, Americans are told they should think. But just wait until your thinking is basically different...You will find out that you AREN'T supposed to think." This is particularly true in the writing of our history. It's not a free speech issue but one of asking questions that challenge the core of the scripted narrative. Historians are validated to the extent that they remain guardians of the United States origin myth.

Many complain that even the educated general public doesn't know basic facts about the structure of government, the constitution, the rights of states and division of powers. Yet there is a widespread acceptance of the greatness and goodness of the United States, along with extreme mistrust of government. The military is the only unifying government institution, the only one trusted and loved, even when the Army itself was divided during the Civil War. That is the blind spot.

Why is there so little about the origins and development of the military in history and political science texts and teaching? The premise of my book is that from earliest settlements in the 1600s, to the adhesion of the thirteen British colonies into an independent nation-state, and up to the present, the military has been the engine of United States development and the core of patriotism. Yet generations have had little knowledge of and interaction with the military; it is nearly invisible in everyday life. But the annals of military history reveal the architecture of its formation and function.

This is what I discovered when I was struggling to write U.S. history from the perspective of the Native American nations' experiences, and it's what readers discover when they read the book and wonder why it hasn't been written before. It's no secret, but akin to the king's new clothes.

Air Force officer and military historian John Grenier isn't the first military historian to locate the roots of the U.S. military in the English/U.S. settlers genocidal wars against Native Nations, but his book, The First Way of War, is the most succinct, well-documented, and accessible for civilians. Grenier writes: "For the first 200 years of our military heritage, then, Americans depended on arts of war that contemporary professional soldiers supposedly abhorred: razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders...In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war." From this period, Grenier argues, emerged problematic characteristics of the U.S. way of war and thereby the characteristics of its civilization, which few civilian historians acknowledge.

There's a strong tendency in U.S. history writing to focus on the individual actor, rather than individuals functioning within a system. Surely there are "bad" and "good" people in every society, and there's "bad" and "good" in each individual. But that doesn't tell us much except that social institutions can allow the bad in people to emerge or the good in people to predominate. That is, a society sets standards for behavior and isolates that which it considers "bad." In addition to the good-bad binary, since the surge of the Civil Rights movement, historians writing U.S. history claim to be exploring "warts and all," with "balance," of course, with "violence on both sides." But warts can be removed from the body and leave it intact, which this kind of history does.

Here is an example of the matrix that is uncovered when a thread from the weave of consensus U.S. history is pulled: in July 2015, the California legislative Black Caucus called on the residents of Ft. Bragg, California—the site of a former military base 170 miles north of San Francisco—to change the town's name, General Braxton Bragg the offending historical figure. In the course of his long military career, Bragg, an 1837 West Point graduate, was commander of the Confederate army in the Civil War, and owned over a hundred enslaved Africans. The Black Caucus rightly raised the issue in the wake of the June 17 Charleston, South Carolina, assassination of senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, along with eight worshipers, at the oldest historically black church in North America, Mother Emanuel. Shocked attention quickly turned to the continued presence of the Confederate flag on the South Carolina state house in Charleston, the assassin being a self-identified white supremacist whose Internet photos show him toting the Confederate flag.

A national debate ensued, not only about the proliferation of Confederate flags throughout the South and in white supremacist enclaves all over the country, but also public monuments and place names, particularly army bases named after Confederate officers. There are, in fact, nine other U.S. military bases in addition to Ft. Bragg that are named after Confederate officers, mostly in the South.

Few in California knew that their state hosted a base, now a town, named after a Confederate General, but the argument began immediately. Those opposed to changing the name pointed out that General Bragg was a decorated Army officer in 1857 when Ft. Bragg was built and named, three years before the Civil War. That's certainly different from those bases in the South named after Confederates, which occurred in the 20th century. The naming honor recalled Bragg's heroic actions as a captain serving under Major General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican invasion and occupation of Mexico City in 1847. And the purpose of establishing Ft. Bragg? To enforce the confinement of Indigenous Californians forced into the newly established Mendocino Indian reservation.

The Black Caucus statement asserted that it was inappropriate to honor an individual who committed treason against the U.S. in defense of slavery. Nearly everyone who has argued for the change of names of military bases has invoked treason. Yet all of the West Point graduate officers who led the Confederacy, after whom bases are named, had been honorably recognized for their feats in the invasion of Mexico, including Robert E. Lee, and several also in the wars against the Seminole Nation in the Everglades (1816-1858). But, it seems, it would have been appropriate had these officers not chosen the Confederate side and stayed in the U.S. army to slaughter Native Americans during and after the Civil War, like nearly every military officer of the Union army: Sherman, Fremont, Grant, Custer, to name the most famous. In fact, the majority of U.S. army bases on the continent were initially outposts for wars against the Indigenous nations—Forts Snelling, Hays, Kearney, Leavenworth, Sill, and Riley, the latter the base of George Armstrong Custer's 7th Cavalry, now the 1st Infantry Division, all named after U.S. Army officers who commanded the genocidal wars.

For most of the period from the U.S. War of Independence to the 1890s, the sole function of the U.S. military was to kill, round up refugees, relocate, and confine Native Americans and appropriate their land and resources to place Anglo settlers, particularly slave-owning planters involved in mono/cash crop production. The army officers of both the Confederacy and the Union had made their careers in genocidal campaigns against Native nations and Mexico, annexing half its territory, and including three major wars against the Seminole Nation before the Civil War. Both Union and Confederate armies posted regiments west of the Mississippi to invade territories of the Dakota, Cheyenne, Navajo, and Apache nations. Wars against the Native peoples did not miss a beat during the Civil War, after which it was total war to destroy the Native nations in the Northern Plains and Southwest.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro.

The Doctrine of Discoverytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d14536ea970c2015-08-07T12:56:15-04:002017-08-09T11:58:15-04:00By Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz View image | gettyimages.com August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The United Nations selected this date to recognize the accolades and contributions of the world’s indigenous peoples as well as to promote and...Beacon Broadside

August 9 is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. The United Nations selected this date to recognize the accolades and contributions of the world’s indigenous peoples as well as to promote and protect their rights. In time for the paperback release of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s American Book Award-winning An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, we're sharing the following passage from her book to commemorate the occasion. In this passage, Dunbar-Ortiz gives the history of the day’s creation and the role our very own UUA played in repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery.

***

In 1982, the government of Spain and the Holy See (the Vatican, which is a nonvoting state member of the United Nations) proposed to the UN General Assembly that the year 1992 be celebrated in the United Nations as an “encounter” between Europe and the peoples of the Americas, with Europeans bearing the gifts of civilization and Christianity to the Indigenous peoples. To the shock of the North Atlantic states that supported Spain’s resolution (including the United States and Canada), the entire African delegation walked out of the meeting and returned with an impassioned statement condemning a proposal to celebrate colonialism in the United Nations, which was established for the purpose of ending colonialism.

The “Doctrine of Discovery” had reared its head in the wrong place. The resolution was dead, but it was not the end of efforts by Spain, the Vatican, and others in the West to make the Quincentennial a cause for celebration.

Only five years before the debacle in the UN General Assembly, the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas conference at the UN’s Geneva headquarters had proposed that 1992 be made the UN “year of mourning” for the onset of colonialism, African slavery, and genocide against the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and that October 12 be designated as the UN International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. As the time drew near to the Quincentennial, Spain took the lead in fighting the Indigenous proposals. Spain and the Vatican also spent years and huge sums of money preparing for their own celebration of Columbus, enlisting the help of all of the countries of Latin America except Cuba, which refused (and paid for this in withdrawn Spanish financial investments). In the United States, the George H. W. Bush administration cooperated with the project and produced its own series of events. In the end, compromise won at the United Nations: Indigenous peoples garnered a Decade for the World’s Indigenous Peoples, which officially began in 1994 but was inaugurated at UN headquarters in New York in December 1992. August 9, not October 12, was designated as the annual UN International Day for the World’s Indigenous Peoples, and the Nobel Peace Prize went to Guatemalan Mayan leader Rigoberta Menchú, announced in Oslo on October 12, 1992, a decision that infuriated the Spanish government and the Vatican. The organized celebrations of Columbus flopped, thanks to multiple, highly visible protests by Indigenous peoples and their allies. Particularly, support grew for the work of Indigenous peoples at the United Nations to develop new international law standards.

According to the centuries-old Doctrine of Discovery, European nations acquired title to the lands they “discovered,” and Indigenous inhabitants lost their natural right to that land after Europeans had arrived and claimed it. Under this legal cover for theft, Euro-American wars of conquest and settler colonialism devastated Indigenous nations and communities, ripping their territories away from them and transforming the land into private property, real estate. Most of that land ended up in the hands of land speculators and agribusiness operators, many of which, up to the mid-nineteenth century, were plantations worked by another form of private property, enslaved Africans. Arcane as it may seem, the doctrine remains the basis for federal laws still in effect that control Indigenous peoples’ lives and destinies, even their histories by distorting them.

THE WHIP OF COLONIALISM

From the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most of the non-European world was colonized under the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the first principles of international law Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to peoples outside Europe. It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa. Following Columbus’s infamous exploratory voyage in 1492, sponsored by the king and queen of the infant Spanish state, another papal bull extended similar permission to Spain. Disputes between the Portuguese and Spanish monarchies led to the papal-initiated Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), which, besides dividing the globe equally between the two Iberian empires, clarified that only non-Christian lands fell under the discovery doctrine. This doctrine on which all European states relied thus originated with the arbitrary and unilateral establishment of the Iberian monarchies’ exclusive rights under Christian canon law to colonize foreign peoples, and this right was later seized by other European monarchical colonizing projects. The French Republic used this legalistic instrument for its nineteenth- and twentieth-century settler colonialist projects, as did the newly independent United States when it continued the colonization of North America begun by the British.

In 1792, not long after the US founding, Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson claimed that the Doctrine of Discovery developed by European states was international law applicable to the new US government as well. In 1823 the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Marshall held that the Doctrine of Discovery had been an established principle of European law and of English law in effect in Britain’s North American colonies and was also the law of the United States. The Court defined the exclusive property rights that a European country acquired by dint of discovery: “Discovery gave title to the government, by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession.” Therefore, European and Euro-American “discoverers” had gained real-property rights in the lands of Indigenous peoples by merely planting a flag. Indigenous rights were, in the Court’s words, “in no instance, entirely disregarded; but were necessarily, to a considerable extent, impaired.” The Court further held that Indigenous “rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished.” Indigenous people could continue to live on the land, but title resided with the discovering power, the United States. A later decision concluded that Native nations were “domestic, dependent nations.”

The Doctrine of Discovery is so taken for granted that it is rarely mentioned in historical or legal texts published in the Americas. The UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples, which meets annually for two weeks, devoted its entire 2012 session to the doctrine. Three decades earlier, as Indigenous peoples of the Americas began asserting their presence in the UN human rights system, they had proposed such a conference and study. The World Council of Churches, the Unitarian Universalist Church, the Episcopal Church, and other Protestant religious institutions, responding to demands from Indigenous peoples, have made statements disassociating themselves from the Doctrine of Discovery. The New York Society of Friends (Quakers), in denying the legitimacy of the doctrine, asserted in 2012 that it clearly “still has the force of law today” and is not simply a medieval relic. The Quakers pointed out that the United States rationalizes its claims to sovereignty over Native nations, for instance in the 2005 US Supreme Court case, City of Sherrill v. Oneida Nation of Indians. The statement asserts: “We cannot accept that the Doctrine of Discovery was ever a true authority for the forced takings of lands and the enslavement or extermination of peoples.” The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) resolution regarding this is particularly powerful and an excellent model. The UUA “repudiate(s) the Doctrine of Discovery as a relic of colonialism, feudalism, and religious, cultural, and racial biases having no place in the modern day treatment of indigenous peoples.” The Unitarians resolved to “expose the historical reality and impact of the Doctrine of Discovery and eliminate its presence in the contemporary policies, programs, theologies, and structures of Unitarian Universalism; and . . . invite indigenous partners to a process of Honor and Healing (often called Truth and Reconciliation).” They additionally encouraged “other religious bodies to reject the use of the Doctrine of Discovery to dominate indigenous peoples” and resolved to collaborate with groups “to propose a specific Congressional Resolution to repudiate this doctrine . . . and call upon the United States to fully implement the standards of the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the U.S. law and policy without qualifications.”

About the Author

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer and part-Indian mother. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. After receiving her PhD in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she taught in the newly established Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ headquarters in Geneva. Dunbar-Ortiz is the author or editor of seven other books, including Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. She lives in San Francisco. Follow her on Twitter at @rdunbaro.

Beacon Broadside: A Year in Reviewtag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301bb07cf8afb970d2014-12-31T17:20:00-05:002014-12-31T17:20:00-05:00As 2014 comes to a close, we look back at some top Beacon Broadside posts, as well as a few overlooked gems.Beacon Broadside

As the year comes to a close, we’re looking back to some of our most popular posts of 2014, as well as some gems you might have overlooked. Consider it a countdown of a different sort, a look back at a year that was both volatile and filled with possibility, with posts that reflected both the intensity and diversity of our readers. And consider it a promise, as well, that our 2015 posts will be filled with the same inquisitive spirit and intellectual curiosity. Happy New Year!

#1 & #2: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The top two posts of the year were both by historian and Indigenous rights activist, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, whose An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United Statesis the first history of the United States to be told from an Indegenous perspective. In both posts, Dunbar-Ortiz examines the dark history of US holidays marked by the blood of Native peoples. Her “Open Letter to President Barack Obama” implored that we end the celebration of Christopher Columbus, “the very face of European colonialism,” and change the holiday to Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead. “The Myth of Thanksgiving” exposes the nationalist origins of our Thanksgiving tradition, and asks that we use the day to celebrate the resiliance and survival of Native Nations.

#3: How Good Is TIAA-CREF?

When James W. Russell set out to debunk the hype behind 401(k)-style retirement schemes in his book Social Insecurity: 401(k)s and the Retirement Crisis, one company kept eluding criticism: the “nonprofit” TIAA-CREF, retirement plan to many university professors and administrators (as well as, full-disclosure, Beacon Press). In “How Good Is TIAA-CREF?” Russell exposes the nonprofit’s fee structures and corporate practices that reveal TIAA-CREF to be fundamentally no different from all the other financial service giants profiting off our declining retirement accounts.

#5: To the Mountaintop: The Last Speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

On March 18, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first addressed the striking Memphis sanitation workers and their supporters. In a few words, King added union rights for the working poor to his campaign on behalf of the unemployed, a significant victory for labor that Michael K. Honey illuminates in this thoughtful excerpt from “All Labor Has Dignity”, a collection of Dr. King’s thoughts on economic equality.

Bonus Post: Jimmy's Blues: James Baldwin's Poetic Legacy

April brought National Poetry Month and the release of Jimmy’s Blues and Other Poems, all of the published poetry of James Baldwin, including six poems previously only available in a limited edition. To mark the occasion, Beacon publicity assistant Nicholas DiSabatino shared his personal connection with Baldwin’s prophetic and often quite personal poems.

Known for his extensive foresight and incisive critique of American racism in speeches and prose, Baldwinwas no less forgiving in his poetry. As Ferguson, Missouri erupted in protest after the exoneration of Officer Darren Wilson, lines from Baldwin’s apocalyptic “Staggerlee wonders” came to mind, so we asked poet Jericho Brown to bring life to those lines in a video that reframes the poem for our current time. Read a little about “Staggerlee wonders” in this recent post, and watch the video below:

150 Years since Sand Creek: The Limitations of Apologytag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00e54ed2b7aa883301b8d0af6432970c2014-12-23T10:00:00-05:002014-12-23T10:00:00-05:00For Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, it was a touching gesture that the Colorado governor apologized for a massacre that killed hundreds of innocent Native Americans. But who, she wonders, will apologize for the century of genocide and warfare against Indigenous peoples that killed far more?Beacon Broadside

A part of US Civil War history largely ignored, the Sand Creek Massacre, received national attention on its 150th anniversary when Colorado governor John Hickenlooper apologized for the atrocity that occurred on November 29, 1864.

On that date, John Chivington, an ambitious politician known as the “Fighting Parson,” led 700 members of the Third Colorado Volunteers in the grisly deed, attacking Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians who were restricted to a refugee camp near the military post of Fort Lyon in southeastern Colorado. Without provocation or warning, the Union army authorized militia attacked, leaving dead 105 women and children and 28 men. In its 1865 investigation, the Congress Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War recorded testimonies and published a report that documented the aftermath of the killings, when Chivington and his volunteers burned tepees and stole horses. After the smoke had cleared, they had returned and finished off the few surviving casualties while scalping and mutilating the corpses—women and men, young and old, children, babies. Then they decorated their weapons and caps with body parts—fetuses, penises, breasts, and vulvas—and back in Denver they displayed these trophies to the adoring public in Denver’s Apollo Theater and in saloons. Yet, despite the detailed report of the deeds, neither Chivington nor any of his men were reprimanded or prosecuted, signaling a free field for killing.

The Sand Creek massacre was not an anomaly; massacres of unarmed civilians and destruction of their villages and food supplies had long been the policy of the genocidal wars carried out by militias and the US Army from the birth of the United States.

At the end of the Civil War, the US government declared total war against the Indigenous nations of the West, under the leadership of Civil War hero, General William Tecumseh Sherman. In adopting total war against civilians, Sherman brought in its most notorious avatar, George Armstrong Custer, who proved his mettle right away. On November 27, 1868, Custer led the 7th Cavalry against unarmed Cheyenne and Arapaho survivors of the Sand Creek massacre at the Southern Cheyenne reservation on Washita Creek in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) to which they had been moved. In the earlier massacre, the great Cheyenne leader and peacemaker Black Kettle had escaped death. When Black Kettle received word from Cheyenne spies within US army ranks that the 7th Cavalry was headed for the Washita reservation, he and his wife rode out at dawn in a snowstorm, unarmed, to attempt to talk with Custer and assure him that no resistant fighters were present on the reservation. Upon Black Kettle’s approach with a hoisted white flag, Custer ordered the soldiers to fire, and a moment later Black Kettle and his wife lay dead. Custer and his 7th Cavalry proceeded to the reservation and murdered over a hundred Cheyenne women and children, taking ghoulish trophies afterward.

So, it was a touching gesture for the Colorado governor to apologize, and the apology was received graciously by Cheyenne and Arapaho descendants. But Custer’s mopping up of the survivors four years later goes unheard. The massacre on the Washita remains listed in US Army annals as a victory in “the battle of the Washita.”

Apologies serve no purpose unless the full hundred year US war against the Indigenous inhabitants are reckoned with.